To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It

Preservationists say the demolition of the Old City section of Kashgar
is a blow to China’s Islamic and Uighur culture.

A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk
Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the
Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid
treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded
their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s
cramped streets. Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and
porcelain, did the same.

The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart
alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked,
by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.

Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City,
“the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found
anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George
Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old
Silk Road.”

Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at
least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and
shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group
called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments,
plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient
Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice
mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.